Design of a 16-port shared-arm dipole array for ground-penetrating radar

A 16-port shared-arm dipole array (SADA) is designed and its performance is numerically verified. When constructing a physical array structure using a dipole element for imaging radar applications, spacing between elements should be less than a quarter wavelength for alias-free sampling in the aperture domain. The SADA in this paper is designed such that two antenna elements share a single dipole arm in order to make a dense array in the longitudinal direction. In designing the antenna, each arm is resistively loaded for pulse radiation as well as beam pattern with less distortion. The performance of the 16-port SADA with determined resistive loading is then numerically verified by radar imaging simulation.